Minda Honey Wants a Millennial "Waiting to Exhale"

An excerpt of "The Heartbreak Years" on singlehood, friendship and the shape-shifting nature of love.

From the poster for Waiting to Exhale: Loretta Devine, Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, and Lela Rochon.

The Heartbreak Years is about more than the travesty that was dating in my 20s, it's also about the places I found love along the way. I close out my memoir by honoring the women who've stood by my side for years — some for decades — and the lessons in love I've learned from them by being cared for by them and by caring for them. I also felt like it was important to create a space to be real about being displeased about my single status while also showing how a life unpartnered is not a life devoid of love. - Minda Honey

I want a millennial Waiting to Exhale. Give me Keke Palmer changing the password to her billionaire boyfriend’s crypto wallet after she learns, ten years into their relationship, that his ethically nonmonogamous marriage isn’t so ethical after all. When he calls to rage at her, she drops her iPhone—no case, neon acrylics—from the rolled-down window of her Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon into traffic on the 405, and a motorcycle splicing lanes races over it, cracks the screen; the boyfriend’s screams dissolve into static. Give me Michaela Jaé Rodriguez behind the wheel of a bulldozer headed directly into the side of her husband’s love shack in the woods, a cabin he built by hand while she spent weekends ferrying the kids between relatives and extracurricular activities in an SUV crossover she’s hated since the day they bought it. Make certain the sound of the logs splintering, snapping, collapsing is distinct, that there is a shot of her stilettos sinking into a bed of russet pine needles when she leaps, light as can be, from the heavy machinery. Give me SZA in her acting debut. The quiet one. Put a tattoo gun in her hand. Show us how she covers up the looping letters of an ex-lover’s name, the curlicues that were meant to manifest forever love, and makes them into heartbreak art—a flower, a tree, a bird—something that would never hurt you. How she fills in faces, shades them into geometry, into analog Tetris pieces, into anything but a reminder that believing in forever and actually living it are rarely ever the same thing. As she sits on one of those tiny stools and crouches over a client, show the hem of her skirt rising, the tattoo on her thigh in homage to the One she never speaks of; then pan the camera, show that one entering the studio, the old-school door chimes shimmering in sound over their head. Give me Lizzo leading a sing-along of “Truth Hurts”; the girls on her yacht, weaves streaming in the breeze, backs as arched as full sails, like a remixed Titanic moment, are the queens of their own world. The women have decided to release their woes, spend the summer island-hopping. Dress Lizzo in a white captain’s hat that has more fabric than her string bikini, and the man who brings out the refreshments should have almost as much sparkle as the champagne he hands to each of the friends before whispering something in Lizzo’s ear that just makes her grin. Over his shoulder, she sees a yacht full of hotties approaching; her girls see it, too. Everything’s gonna be OK. At least for a little bit because even though it’s next to impossible to meet the right person, the next person who wants to waste your time will always be along shortly. A millennial Waiting to Exhale ends with new love on the horizon instead of self-actualization? Leave it alone. They’re setting us up for the sequel. I want that, too.

I want to watch the millennial Waiting to Exhale alone, pressing the back of my head into the plush velvet of a classic movie theater seat, no vomit-colored leather, no automated reclining. I want a big bag of popcorn and the no-you-really-shouldn’t-believe-it’s-butter to glom beneath my nails. I want to regret not paying for an overpriced Sierra Mist. I want to wonder, when the movie hits a lull midway through, if I should have used the money I spent on a ticket to pay for Bumble premium instead because clearly, their free services are not going to help me move my love life along. I want to snack and space out to the millennial Waiting to Exhale as I nurse another micro-heartbreak bestowed upon me by a man who couldn’t do the basics, like ask you “what your interests are, who you be with, things that make you smile”—Biggie put it to a beat, and these motherfuckers still can’t remember the simplest shit. I want the feel-good reminder that even when these men fail me—again and again—I’ll always have my girls, just like Molly and Issa on a couch on the curb in Insecure.

I want to leave the theater and remember how smart I am for parking near the side door and exit into the sunlight, soothed and ready for another round of disappointing dating roulette. I want to pull out of the parking lot and pray that the millennial Waiting to Exhale has filled me with enough hopefulness to prop me up until the next heartbreak knocks me down.

I don’t want to drive home and worry that the millennial Waiting to Exhale isn’t enough to keep me going. That I need more than the love of good friends to be content. And I don’t want to wonder whether or not I should feel guilty about admitting it. That I fantasize about meeting the love of my life and disappearing into him, my default source of human interaction.

I’m done with heartbreak. Even the small ones. Micro-heartbreaks are like Skittles. They may appear different, but they’re all the same flavor. The man who goes ghost in the middle of the best banter you’ve had all year is the one who reveals he’s an anti-vaxxer three dates in, is the one who was already devastatingly cruel to a woman you know. These are not the major heartbreaks that trigger month-long crying jags. The ones your friends take you out for drinks over. No, these are the ones you only regret because you told your friends about them too soon. One more wrecked fantasy. These little tears are only enough to ruin your morning. To momentarily mistake the ding of a fully charged phone for the “sweet dreams, beautiful” text you’ve received for less than two weeks. The memory of these petites morts adds a dash of melancholy to your Tuesday.

I want to snack and space out to the millennial Waiting to Exhale as I nurse another micro-heartbreak bestowed upon me by a man who couldn’t do the basics, like ask you “what your interests are, who you be with, things that make you smile”—Biggie put it to a beat, and these motherfuckers still can’t remember the simplest shit. I want the feel-good reminder that even when these men fail me—again and again—I’ll always have my girls, just like Molly and Issa on a couch on the curb in Insecure.

A Skittle is a little thing, but have enough of them, an entire bag of them, and sugar becomes grit. Expect sweet; get decay. Your stomach churns. You won’t remember these inconsequential men in a few years, but you’re not quite as ready to forget them as you appear to your friends. You make a show of laughing off their small slights. You move on quickly because they expect you to, because what is three dates, really? But it’s not just three dates; it’s one date, two dates, three dates a dozen times. It’s disappointment scattered, covered, and smothered. But it’s not even like you want the compassion of your friends. You want to release these men, too. Be done with them just like that. You, too, are tired of your own minute heartbreaks. But what are you supposed to do with the minor aches? They resurface repeatedly, like pennies you keep forgetting to spend in your cup holder, sticky and pointless but still in rotation, still a physical object, still a reminder.

When you’re perpetually single, it’s easier to point to what’s missing than what you have. It’s my bed that’s filled with things that are not the body of a lover—books, clothes, laptop. The food packaged in twos and fours at the grocery store. It’s credit card companies pestering you to add a second person to your account—“Double your cashback rewards!”—the assumption being that you share your finances with someone instead of managing every bill, every month, on your own. How you smile when your dual-income friends announce they’ve bought a home. It’s the dinner parties, trips, and couples-only outings—not that anyone excludes their single pals directly; the absence of an invitation to the evening you watch in ten-second installments on your friends’ Instagram Stories speaks for itself. I don’t begrudge my loved ones the inherent satisfaction in even numbers, everyone tidily partnered, their human security blankets within arm’s reach. But being single is not just being the odd one out; you’re even less. An unpartnered person is like zero—the physical representation of nothing. Apparently, our solo presence is incapable of adding anything to certain occasions. Even in death, we aren’t granted a reprieve from our single status, soulmates certain they’ll be reunited in heaven, lovingly chattering about past lives spent together—get ready for third-wheeling in the afterlife. Or maybe not. Maybe your favorite duo will ask you to make them a trio.

Dating apps are overrun with couples looking for a third. Everyone’s some configuration or another of ethically nonmonogamous. I’m now expected to learn to share someone’s perfect somebody when I’ve yet to have my own. I describe myself as emotionally conservative, sexually liberal. I can’t imagine maintaining multiple emotional connections while simultaneously needing to manage my own jealousy and competitiveness. If I joined this wave of nonmonogamy, I’d have to figure out a new way of being in love when I’ve barely figured out one-to-one romantic relationships. It’s not fair that the world’s moving on without me. I’m trying not to be bitter about it, but I’m tired of being denied what I feel owed. Is this how white people who voted for Trump feel?

On the patio of a Mexican restaurant, a Corona-branded umbrella cast its shade over C and me. Occasionally, one of us would tip back in our chair and let the sun warm our face, kiss life into our soul. It was a farewell lunch. C has lived all over the world. Next up: Mumbai. She’d been home for a year—twelve straight months of disappointing dating. But that isn’t even close to being the record for a Black woman in the Bluegrass State. I’d already been let down in love for twice the amount of time she had. And while I pinned most of my romance woes on location, I knew from living in Cincinnati, LA, and Denver that lonely feels the same in any city.

But what C has on me is age. She’s already in her forties. Each decade a woman enters into without a committed life partner, the further people’s views shift from seeing her as someone unlucky in love to someone who is deeply flawed—it’s your choices, your standards, your looks. And it’s not just other people; you begin to do it, too, swapping unlucky with unloved, with unwanted, with un-fuck-wit-able. This ageism persists even though human beings are living longer. Even though the average marriage only lasts eight years. This means the odds of anyone spending a lifetime in love with the same person is unlikely (but obviously, there are relationships that stay the course). So, why can’t we normalize finding “your person” after you’ve found yourself? Your twenties are for floundering. Your thirties are for figuring it out. And your forties, your forties could be for falling in love. Having children does become more complicated on this timeline, but people have been making it work. Besides, I don’t want to have a baby, and neither does C.

Over lunch, I described the most recent episode of This Is Us. The one where Beth tells Randall she loves him and she has no regrets, but loving him and living inside his dream have come at the expense of living hers. She’s pushed her dance dreams to the side for his career aspirations and their children. I challenged C, and myself, to consider which stretch of our lives we’d exchange for steady love. It was hard for each of us to say.

C squeezed a wedge of lime over her tacos and contemplated my question. The tangy scent of the citrus lifted into the air briefly. Dark sunglasses concealed her eyes.

I tend to imagine that the partner I am missing out on is the partner who would have been the best possible match for me. The missing partner is not the partner who would have dragged me down into debt. Not the partner determined to decimate my self-esteem. Not the one who’d be reluctant to hold me in bed. I rarely imagine that my singleness has saved me from the misery that loves company. The worst possible partner wouldn’t be worth trading for any portion of my life—but they would garner me an invite to the next couples’ brunch.

Order the book.

Still, even when imagining the best possible partner, the question I asked C is hard to answer. How much would I wager for a never-ending love with the right man? I’ve believed I was ready for a relationship since I left my last serious one at twenty-three. Had I met my man at twenty-three, it’s likely nothing that’s happened to me beyond that age would have happened, or at least it would have looked drastically different. Would I be willing to never have made the friends I made that year? The women who held me together through heartbreak and my hair back in the aftermath of too much partying?

Maybe twenty-three would have been too soon. What about twenty-seven? I was living in LA then. If I’d met my man and he’d wanted to stay in that city forever—perhaps he had family nearby or his career was location specific—could I have spent the rest of my life as an Angeleno? The waifs, the traffic, life teetering on the verge of the Big One. I don’t know.

At twenty-eight, I was living in Denver. It’s a city I think I could have been happy in if I’d moved there already married. It wasn’t a city meant for meeting someone, at least not for me or any of the Black women I socialized with. But a husband and I could have had a happy little life at the base of a mountain. But is that really true? Am I a wife who’d participate in winter sports and hikes through tick-filled forests? Would I have even become a writer if I hadn’t been free to flee that city for an MFA program in the desert? I don’t know. Maybe my husband would have followed me, or maybe my life would have followed the This Is Us script, and like Beth and her dance dreams, mine would have been indefinitely deferred.

When I moved home to Louisville at thirty-one, I was ready to settle down, even if it meant settling. I found me a tall, good-looking man. I was patient with him, gently explaining how a story he’d told me was transphobic or how his take on some movie was misogynistic. Still, his feelings bruised. There was tension when he found out I’d only walked his dog for twenty minutes instead of an hour because it was dark out and the temperature was in the twenties. He didn’t read. I didn’t watch sports. But whatever, I was ready to shift my life into its final phase, for everything to be decided. Unfortunately, there was another girl. She waited until my birthday to comment on an Instagram photo of him and me. He’d been trying to convince me to move to Cleveland, where he planned to live with his mother and go to grad school. I refused to relocate, and he insisted we could make it work long distance. Loving that man would have meant spending vacation days and expendable income traveling back and forth to fucking Ohio. I DM’d her—she could have him. I’d learned over the years that I could survive heartbreak, but that was only because I always had my own life to return to. If I’d put my life on pause to settle for that man, I don’t know how I’d manage the disappointment when the relationship inevitably fell apart.

That man was a cheater, but now, I’m in my late thirties, and I’ve ended relationships with men who I believe would have remained faithful and intended to marry me. But they were asking me to live in their dreams with them at a time when my own dreams—like this book—were becoming more possible. One man dreamed of us in a renovated Victorian home with a pattern inset in the wood floors. But he was mid-divorce, and when I looked at him, I wondered if every moment we spent together was a rehash. Us standing in the kitchen together, side by side, following the lines of a recipe. That look, that touch. If that falling-too-fast feeling was a by-product of his rush to replace someone else. If when I spoke certain words, they rippled in his memory, made his heart ache for her. Whether I was trying to find love along the scar of his broken marriage.

Another one sat beside me near a firepit, and his facade of compromise fell away. “I want it all,” he said. Our all-inclusive life meant children, meant me leaving my city, meant me deprioritizing my career to support the family we’d have. I watched the flames of the fire lick the air and knew I would burn that relationship down before I made kindling of my dreams—and I did. I’ve never wanted children. I need a life I can fold up like an origami swan and float away with when necessary. Children are the opposite of that, forever unfolding.

I wanted so much of what these partners were offering, but I just couldn’t jump the rails and send my life down an entirely different track. When is a man your destiny, and when is he a distraction? Undecided.

By the end of lunch, our to-go boxes packed, C hadn’t offered an answer to my question, and neither had I. We hugged goodbye, then parted ways, headed in opposite directions, on our own as we navigated around couples holding hands, strolling down the sidewalk.

When I left Louisville in my early twenties, I didn’t know that my life would look so drastically different from the lives of my high school and college friends who’d stayed behind. Most people never step out of the life they were born into. Leaving broadens what’s possible; it’s cozying up to the unknown and welcoming the unpredictable.

I frequently question how this tragic love life could happen to me. Whyyy meeee? But did it happen to me, or did I choose it? At every moment of my life that asked me to choose, I chose the path that led me further from the marriage I claimed I wanted. I left the South, where the marriage rates (and the divorce rates) are higher. I ended a long-term relationship with a man whose love was most devout. I chose career. I chose grad school. I chose assholes. I say I was ready for another serious relationship at twenty-three, but I didn’t narrow my dating pool to serious men only. I dated the ones who lit up something inside me, men who detonated my heart. The slackers, the artists, the ones selfish about living out their dreams. The ones I wished I could be more like. If you insist on loving men who can’t commit, how committed are you to commitment? It’s possible to be perpetually single without being perpetually heartbroken, but that was not the path I chose.

None of those men ever asked me to marry them. I think they knew I couldn’t be trusted. That there was no way I could remain what I’d presented myself as, that at some point, I would stop acquiescing, stop holding my breath around them. I can’t fault them for recognizing the largeness of the life I wanted to live, my ambitions beyond playing the supporting cast in their dreams. I had to get honest with myself about wanting to be my own main character. And equally important, I wanted to be with a man who didn’t require that I lie to myself about who he was.

My best friend from high school, S, is divorced. It was difficult. Her children were young at the time. She’s remarried now. Her husband is open to adventure, kind, and cares about her happiness. I like him for her. I admire her for having the strength to choose the life she wanted.

For work, S was driving back and forth between Kentucky and Florida every few weeks. We shared hours-long phone calls with topics that spanned the length of our friendship. On one call, I was taking a rare—for me—hike through the woods in southern Indiana while we chatted about the “miserable women” literature we’d been assigned to read in high school. I told her, as the trail led me back toward the parking lot and my car, “I’ll never forget what a downer the end of The Awakening was.” I remember, as a teenager, being disgusted that the protagonist just straight up marches into the ocean.

Why were our syllabi filled with books about unfulfilled women? My bestie quipped, “This is our canon?”

It was early March. The trees were still bare. A narrow creek burbled, and a misplaced foot meant sliding a sneaker into fudgy mud. My Apple Watch dinged happily when my green exercise ring closed and then again when my magenta activity ring was completed.

We read the stories of centuries of women who could not find freedom within their marriages. But it wasn’t like there were counternarratives of women who were single and joyful, either. To be alone was to be destitute and ostracized. To be vulnerable. To be cast as a witch. To be branded unworthy. It’s not hard to see how women trapped by marriage on the page morphed into women springing their own marriage traps on the big screen. Propaganda to convince us we couldn’t be fulfilled without the same marriages that left our foremothers drowning in dissatisfaction. I grew up on movies with women losing men in ten days and winning them back over pickup games of basketball.

I detoured just before the parking lot and ventured a bit down another trail toward what looked like a man-made lake. It was small and unimpressive. I headed back to my car.

I want to leave the theater and remember how smart I am for parking near the side door and exit into the sunlight, soothed and ready for another round of disappointing dating roulette. I want to pull out of the parking lot and pray that the millennial Waiting to Exhale has filled me with enough hopefulness to prop me up until the next heartbreak knocks me down.

If I have to continue this life unpaired, is it too much to ask for some positive representation? Where are the women who see their aloneness as solitude? I want to see women who have actively chosen a life of one. Women who are still open to love but are passing their time pleasantly without desperation. Women who don’t scramble toward any bit of cast-off attention from a man, women who are choosing themselves without question. Always. What if instead of wading into a watery death, Kate Chopin’s heroine dove beneath the waves, grew gills, and swam through to a true awakening on the shore of an island of Amazons? What if her happily ever after became a good book; a warm mug of tea; and the wet, green scent of spring flowing through a nearby open window, her children gone for the weekend?

But women in the books we were assigned to read were very different from the women in the books I found on my own. Janie walking out of homes where love no longer resided. Sula opting out of the dull norms and drudgery expected of the women in her town. And the Black women writers behind these books who were equally emblematic of the life I could live. Instead of a life that swung back and forth between love found and love lost, my art could be my central passion, the community of women around me my most important love affair.

I stayed on the phone with my bestie my entire drive back across the river to Louisville and until I was inside, about to strip down for my shower. I wished S a safe rest of her road trip before I hung up. Sometimes, it’s as if her life is the path I didn’t choose. We’d both dated our high school sweethearts past college. While I moved to California with mine, she’d stayed in Louisville with hers. They were engaged at one point. When she called me about their breakup, I knew my own was soon to follow. I remember listening to her tell me why they were done for good this time while I lay on my back on the diving board in my ex’s grandparents’ backyard, staring straight up at Orange County blue skies, chlorine and orange blossoms in the air. Kentucky was so far away.

When she married her first husband, I flew home for her wedding on an Indiana farm. I missed her first pregnancy, but I felt the miracle of tiny feet kick her belly from within when she was pregnant with her second child. While I was in grad school on the West Coast, I’d come home from the bar and she’d call me, three time zones away, and we’d sit on the phone together, her breast pump whirring in the background of my drunk murmuring. Later, after grad school, I moved back home to Louisville. During her divorce, I was there for the texts and the calls, and the drinks and the nights spent out too late, as if we could snatch back a bit of the youth the years had taken from us. Now, she is married again, happy again.

And still, I’m single. No children. On what must be my fourth career. Why does a sense of inertia cling to that word? Single. As if I’ve not lived a life, too. As if, on those calls with my best friend, she wasn’t consoling and guiding me as well, through heartbreak and moves across states and big risks. She granted my narrative the same sovereignty as hers. And her life looking more conventional hadn’t insulated her from heartbreak or loneliness. Pain is pain, joy is joy, and you’re bound to encounter them both, no matter which series of life choices you make.

I am thankful all those men I dated were unanswered prayers. When I was a child, I loved catching lightning bugs. I’d put dozens in a single glass jar and place it on my dresser, watching the magical blinking all night until I fell asleep. Every morning, my father made me release the lightning bugs back into our yard. I’d plead with him to let me keep them, but he insisted that they belonged in their world, not mine. The men I’ve loved were like those lightning bugs; they flickered beautifully briefly, but once cupped in my hands, they dimmed and became nothing special. They were meant to light up moments of my life, then be released. It’s the women in my life who have held a steady glow for me.

The drive from my home to K’s home is the length of two moderately long pop songs. The year she tells me about the painful lump in her breast—so big she can see it through her skin, like a chunk of Kryptonite embedded in her chest, throbbing—I listen to Panic! at the Disco’s new song “High Hopes” on endless loop in my car. She is thirty-five.

The weekend between her biopsy and receiving the results from her doctor, she asks me to have a drink with her. We do that short-girl clamber onto two stools at the bar. It’s a crowded venue that was designed to look like a series of living rooms. “This may be my last drink for a while,” she says, raising her glass of bourbon in the air, tapping it against mine, then against the bar before bringing it to her lips.

It’s cancer.

But her husband is the exact husband you would want by your side during cancer. During lunch at a restaurant with a patio that overlooks the Ohio River, rolling murky and brown, K tells me about the women in her cancer Facebook groups who’ve discovered, over the course of their illnesses, that they do not have the husbands you would want by your side during cancer, not even close. Husbands who still expect their chemo-choked wives to solely manage the children and the home. Husbands who look at their wives’ changing bodies and the changes to come with disappointment. Husbands who check out and hope to check back in when their wives return to the right side of healthy. But K’s husband is pure love, pure patience, and his only want from any of this is for his wife not to die at fucking thirty-five years old—the state of her tits in “the After” is irrelevant.

She’s planned our lunch around her chemo schedule so she can enjoy her food without nausea and the delicate spring weather blooming all around us. We decide to treat ourselves to a few ounces of crab off the raw menu. As she talks, I am happy for her, happy that she married well. I am, but I am also something else. Something harder to admit. It’s bad form to be jealous of your friend battling cancer.

I couldn’t help but think about what it’d be like if I were the one stricken with breast cancer at an abnormally young age. Who would be there to care for me? I imagined myself alone in my gold-framed canopy bed, dehydrated, silently praying for someone to bring me a glass of water, gingerly lifting myself out of bed and creeping into the kitchen to pour my own. On that patio with K, I’m convinced that as a single person, I’d be just as in it by myself as one of those Facebook group wives.

We’ve been taught that a spouse is someone to care for you when you’re old. A husband as an illness contingency plan isn’t the most romantic thing, but when I catalog my fears around never finding my right partner, dealing with aging and poor health alone is a frightening future. But is it more frightening than being married to a man who refuses to honor the “in sickness and in health” portion of our vows? Do I really need to be frightened at all?

When my cousin gets their gender-affirming surgeries, their friends call and visit and feed them and stay with them until they are well enough to care for themselves. They are there, unlike the supposedly obligated husbands who are not. When that man stalked me through my neighborhood, my friends and family reached out immediately, sent cards and flowers and left baked goods on my steps, did what they could to care for me. Even with K, even with the exact husband you’d want by your side during cancer, there’s no way he could be all the things she needed without the support of her community. When he travels for work, we walk the dog; we stay with K; we are less than a phone call away. There is no point in our lives that our needs aren’t too much for one person to handle. Even love does not somehow make it possible for one person to be our everything. Maybe I’m a little more nonmonogamous than I thought—at least in my friendships.

K’s love is the sticky, grippy kind of love that isn’t afraid to make itself known. Once she is cancer-free, her hair grows back in layers of baby-soft curls that sweep over one another in brown waves, a tender ocean providing cover.

We cannot say whether our partner will stay if we become ill. Or if our health will return in full or at all. We cannot know if our community will be there for us, in the short term or the long. K and I have discussed how you can’t make the choices you make based on the outcomes you can’t predict. All we can do is love ourselves, love others, and hope to be loved in return.

It’s been more than a decade since my last long-term relationship. I consider myself to have mostly spent my adult life single, but I’m not sure that that’s actually true. I can’t just write off all those short-term, revolving-door relationships. It’s not a failure to leave a situation that is no longer working. Maybe my romantic relationships are so short because, in my experience, it’s been much easier to be happy without a man than it has been to be happy with a man. This isn’t a knock against men, not completely. Aside from compatibility issues, to love a man is to bring the patriarchy into your private life. I don’t want to be mansplained to at the office and in the bedroom. I don’t want to experience the gender wage gap at work and the gender labor gap over household chores. I gripe that I pay every bill by myself, but I’ve also been fortunate to be able to pay every bill by myself. I’ve never had to compromise on my feelings in the name of financial stability.

Maybe I’m foolish to be holding out for a relationship of true equals—In this patriarchy?—but at this point, there is too much at stake. In my twenties, it was easier to fall for men who weren’t right for me because so much of my life didn’t feel right for me. Those men were portals into alternate realities, potentially better realities. I was searching for a man to build a life around, but in my thirties, I’m waiting to find a man who fits the life I’ve built.

For proof I’m capable of longevity, again, I turn to my friendships. They span decades and multiple states. And for all the real estate I’ve given dating in my life’s story, my friendships are the relationships that taught me how to show care and tenderness, to forgive others and myself. One of my first and closest friends in Orange County was E. She was the first person I knew who saw a therapist, or at least the first one who spoke openly about it. Soon enough, “Well, what did Debbie say about it?” was a regular part of our conversations. Before E, I was the type of person who’d get upset and end a friendship to prove to someone just how much I didn’t need them. But these moments didn’t seem to register for her. She’d continue to show up at the same time to pick me up for the gym and would keep sending me five-thousand-word emails in the middle of the workday, until I was forced to explain that I was angry at her—tricked into talking about my feelings. After we talked it over, whatever issue I had no longer seemed that serious. In fact, nothing became too big or too small to share with her—or her with me. When I told her, over dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant, that I was leaving California for Colorado, she wept. Whenever I return to Los Angeles, I fly out of Orange County just so I can stay the night with E, curl up on her couch under her fluffy duvet, and sip mugs of tea while we reminisce over our drunk-on-the-dance-floor years.

Having the love of friends does not stop the wanting. And that doesn’t make the love from my friends any less valuable. I don’t know where a Black woman nearing forty should go to find romantic love. But I do know I don’t have to go it alone, that I’m not waiting by myself. I can both want more and appreciate that I already have more love than most in my life. A love that has yet to fail me.

In a millennial Waiting to Exhale, just like in the original, the people who choose you, who choose to be by your side, who choose you to be by theirs, are not a consolation prize. They are, and will always be, your greatest love story. The grandest gesture of love. The epilogue to my heartbreak years.